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In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travelers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point of reference for travel and imaginative geography in general. At the same time, concepts of pleasure and enjoyment became entangled with visual and verbal representations of that which was foreign.

With chapters by Ken Arnold, Rosemary Bechler, Richard Hamblyn, Roy Porter, E. S. Shaffer, Nicholas Thomas, Tzvetan Todorov, Richard Wrigley, and the editors, Transports discusses a range of original topics. These include narrative orderings of travel; the classification of exotic objects; pastoral and paradisal topography in the paintings of Claude Lorrain; Beckford's invocations of China as he travels through Italy; volcanoes in the discourses of travel and geology; the experience of Rome; crossing boundaries and exceeding limits in travel and in the sublime; liberty and license in New Zealand; foreigners' responses to the high-velocity culture of London; and Byron's sublime impulse beyond the established bounds of the Grand Tour.

Chloe Chard is a literary historian who has specialized in travel writing, eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and art criticism, and the Gothic novel. Helen Langdon is an art historian and writer with particular interests in the Italian Baroque and in travel.

"This beautifully produced volume falls nicely into the interstices of disciplines. Ostensibly it is art history . . . but because the collection deals with construction of significance in landscapes, it represents good humanistic geography. . . . A must for research libraries as well as those supporting sophisticated students at all levels in cultural studies."?Choice

"The book is altogether an attractive and substantial contribution to the growing interest in 'imaginative geography'."?Malcolm Andrews, International Journal of Heritage Studies

"All the contributors tease out, elegantly and lucidly, the complexities of Europe's encounter with itself and the wider world."?Mark Harrison, Medical History

"This book enriches current scholarship on the travel narrative by amplifying its interdisciplinary. A range of scholarship?from literary criticism and art history to museum science, anthropology, and even the natural sciences?comes together here to represent the many discourses from which travel accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew."?Albion

"An interesting collection of essays that illuminates the cultural and imaginative geography of the Grand Tour."?Ann Bermingham, Eighteenth Century Studies